A quick question regarding determining priority of an Incident. Two main parameters that determine priority is Impact and Urgency. ITIL also mentions 'expected effort' but I will not be able to obtain this information in the context of the project I am working on.

Can anybody share what metrics/indicators are most commonly used to set Impact and Urgency. I will probably won't be able to obtain information regarding all of them (let's face it, company I work for does not have SLA, so information varies from group to group), but I am hoping to use the once that will be most relevant to the existing environment to build a priority guide.

For example:

Impact - # users, time period of an outage (there are critical times when system must be up), # critical systems (modules) impacted, ???

Urgency - current duration of an incident, recovery time objective, amount of data loss, ???

I would highly appreciate if you folk could provide some suggestions regarding other types of information that can be used for Impact and Urgency determination.

This is a topic that is implemented in many different ways in all the tools on the market and they all produce a somewhat acceptable result. What ITIL says is that your priority is defined by impact and urgency, and that it can be influenced by other factors as well, such as expected effort.

In my own geeky mind, I wish business impact would simply be a objective evaluation of the incident by the system, based on the organization affected, number of users, type of service and severity of the incident (service totally down, degraded, severely degraded).

Then I wish the operator would be able to weigh in by providing his/her understanding of urgency (is it a VIP?, is a business deal being closed right now, etc)

Out of that I wish the system would provide a priority code that would take into consideration all possible inputs, both the objective and the subjective, and calculate a simple rating.

I've never been completely happy with the solutions I've seen. But they all work. Your suggestions that influence business impact are all good provided that you can quantify them..._________________BR,
Fabien Papleux

Thanks for your input Fabien. I know understaind you point and this is essentially the same way I am approaching prioritization. I was just wondering if there were some other (than those I have listed) easily identifiable (and quantifiable) parameters for Impact and Urgency.